Wyld's Great Globe - Legacy

Legacy

Though there was little immediate interest in reviving Wyld's idea, the concept of a giant globe was not altogether forgotten. A slightly smaller convex globe, with a diameter of 12.73 metres (41.8 ft), featured at the Paris Exposition of 1889. Ideas for a gigantic globe at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 were unrealistic – one was for an assembly hall for ten to fifteen thousand people inside a globe supported on the shoulders of a 450-foot-tall (140 m) giant, and another was for a globe so large that a lift would be needed to reach the equator and a journey on a specially constructed spiral railway required to reach the North Pole.

In 1897, the geographer Thomas Ruddiman Johnston proposed building another giant globe in London. His plan was for a more conventional convex representation of the Earth's topography which visitors could admire from a spiral walkway that would encircle the globe. On a scale of about 8 miles to the inch (roughly 5.2 kilometres to the centimetre), his globe would have been 84 feet (26 m) in diameter (almost 24 feet (7.3 m) larger than Wyld's). Although Ruddiman Johnston got as far as preparing some of the sections, the proposal ultimately came to nothing.

Élisée Reclus proposed building an even larger version for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and plans for the construction were well advanced before the idea was scrapped. Reclus' Great Globe was to be 26 metres (85 ft) in diameter and feature a 1/500,000 scale globe, a planetarium and a panorama of human evolution. The Cosmorama, an only slightly less ambitious project was built for the Exposition. The Cosmorama, which was located near the foot of the Eiffel Tower, featured a 46-metre-diameter (151 ft) Celestial Sphere.

Paul Reclus, Élisée's nephew, worked with Sir Patrick Geddes on a globe project for the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, but none of Geddes' ambitious plans were realised; Reclus produced a small model of what was called "The Hollow Globe" – a projection of what the earth would look like if it were transparent and viewed from the vantage point of the tower itself – and Geddes created a concave paper celestial sphere which a single person could enter.

It was not until 1935 that anything resembling Wyld's Globe was recreated. In 1930 Chester Lindsay Churchill was commissioned to design a new headquarters for the Christian Science Publishing Society. Within his design Churchill included the Mapparium, a giant ball with a concave projection of the earth made up of 608 glass panels and spanned internally by a 30-foot (9.1 m) glass bridge. The Mapparium opened in July 1935 and by October of the same year had received 50,000 visitors.